


Essays and Lab Reports

by ScripStrel



Series: Michael Mell - Actual Demon [3]
Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Advice, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Angst with a Happy Ending, Demons, Dialogue Heavy, Doodles, F/M, Fluff, Frankenstein - Freeform, Friendship, Homework, Light Angst, Like More Than Usual, Male-Female Friendship, Musical References, Pokemon References, Post-Canon, Post-Squip, Star Wars References, it's kinda excessive, video game references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-06 01:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17336039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScripStrel/pseuds/ScripStrel
Summary: Christine has really grown on Michael lately, from her dedication to everything from homework to college auditions to her apparent reluctance to tell her boyfriend her big, dark secret.Wait, what?





	Essays and Lab Reports

“I really hate coming up with opening sentences,” Christine groaned, keyboard smashing yet again.

“Dude, same,” Michael grumbled. His face was pressed into his shoulder, glasses askew. He swirled his pen absently on the corner of his paper, doodling rather than actually attempting the bullshit lab report. “Just spit out something about an allegory or whatever.”

Christine slammed her laptop shut. “I can’t do this, Michael! I can’t focus and I’m gonna flunk out of high school because I can’t write a decent Frankenstein essay.” He didn’t bother to look up, instead adding detail to his shitty drawing. Mario was making out with Link, and the only reason you could tell who was who was the contrasting pen colors. Hey, he never claimed to be an artist.

Their shared free block had really helped Michael warm up to Christine. Spending several hours a week griping to each other about math homework, college applications, and terrible teachers was a fast way to become closer acquaintances, at least. He’d discovered that she was actually not going to New York for her theatre degree like everyone expected, but was instead aiming for Chicago because she had family there. He’d also learned that she was crazy good at remembering everything from vocab to gravity coefficient formulas, even if she could never seem to sit still to learn them, and she’d saved his ass on test day more than once. He’d helped her run lines and told her every embarrassing story about Jeremy he could think of. It was a good time.

“Just skip to the body paragraph, then? No one said you had to write an essay in order,” Michael said, now drawing 8-bit hearts.

“I don’t know what I’m writing, though.” Christine slumped down in her chair. “I read the book, but I have no idea what happened in any of it. Victor got obsessed with science, made a monster, freaked out, left it to wander the world, at which point it spent like _four_ whole chapters explaining how it learned to talk, and then it went and killed everyone Victor loved when Victor wouldn’t make it a girlfriend.”

Michael snorted. “Sounds like you know exactly what happened.” Should he add Peach and Zelda looking scandalized in the background?

“But I don’t know what it _means,”_ Christine whined. “Romantic literature _sucks._ It was all just Victor being angsty and saying the mountains looked pretty and the monster was evil. Except he didn’t actually describe anything, he just said it was and moved on.”

Nope, better idea: Goomba giving Bowser a blowjob. Jeremy would find that hilarious. He could keep it with last week’s ‘Star Wars as a Porno’ doodle that featured blob-like renditions of R2-D2 and C3PO going to _town_ (as well as droids conceivably could) _._ “I wouldn’t know,” he admitted. “The only Romantic Era thing I ever read was Scarlet Letter sophomore year, but that sounds about right.”

Christine huffed and opened her computer again, clacking furiously at the keyboard. “More emails from colleges I don’t care about,” she muttered.

“Ugh, me too,” Michael said. Bowser was turning out looking more like a Blastoise reject, but whatever. Big, fuck-off turtle getting his dick sucked by a mushroom. Good enough. “This one school in Kansas will _not_ leave me alone.”

Christine kept scrolling. “Hang on, this one looks important,” she said. Drawing finished, Michael realized he should probably actually try to graph his specific heat capacity data or something instead of building a portfolio of NSFW nerd art, as funny as it was. “What do they mean, audition?” Christine asked.

Michael glanced up from his shuffling papers, searching for the data set amongst his notes. “What’s up?”

“A school I was already accepted to is saying I need to send them audition stuff, only they don’t do their auditions until after term starts, which is why I’ve had them as my backup.” She clicked around for a minute. “Oh, wait. Okay. It’s just for scholarships.”

“You should still do it, though,” Michael said with a shrug. “Free money.”

“I could totally just send them the stuff I recorded for prescreens,” Christine hummed, biting a nail, “except I actually really hated both songs as soon as I’d finished recording them.”

Michael found the data set and started copying the points down onto a scribbled axis. “You should do the one you used for that drama club thing last year.” Jeremy had dragged him along to the glorified talent show, and he had to admit that Christine’s 11 o’clock breakup number stole the show.

She sighed and started playing with her hair. “I can’t. They want me to stay in my age range, and that character is in her forties. I’d do the one from the scene I did with Jeremy, but I’m not sure I’m the right person to try and portray Eve, even if it was after they got kicked out of the garden.”

“I thought you did great before.” He pouted at her. “Also, you’re _way_ older than forty.”

“Michael!” She giggled and stuck her tongue out. “It’s a matter of principle. Besides, I can’t play a religious figure, considering—”

Michael waved her off. “Yeah, yeah, but it’s not like you’d be an angel or anything. Eve was fucked up. That’s the whole point. She was the original fuck-up.”

Christine glared at him. “Excuse you, mister, but it was Adam’s job to keep an eye on her, and he didn’t stop her from eating the apple, so really it would’ve been his fault.”

Biting back a laugh, Michael kicked her under the table. “You and your double-standard feminism! Are you saying her free will counted less than his or is it just your excuse to pass the buck?”

“I’m _saying,”_ Christine said, kicking back, “that I’m not doing it, and I’m definitely not discussing theology with you in the library when we’re supposed to be working.”

“Okay, okay. Fine.” Michael raised his hands in mock surrender, turning his reluctant attention back to his lab report. “Though I’d probably call it like, ultra-prehistory or something before I’d call it theology.”

“Nature of sin is theology, dummy.” Christine’s eyes were trained back on her computer, now presumably browsing through Spotify (“It’s evil, Chris. They barely pay the artists _anything.”_ “I don’t have the kind of money to buy all of my soundtracks before I’ve even listened to them to know if I like them!” “Are there any you _don’t_ like!?”) for song inspiration. “There are so many requirements. They can’t possibly expect me to meet all of them.”

Michael hummed an acknowledgement, searching for some feasible straightedge so his graph wouldn’t end up looking as bad as the Nintendo porn.

“Mikey, help me think of songs!” Christine begged.

He glanced up over his glasses, scowling and letting his eyes go dark. “Don’t call me Mikey.”

Christine giggled and pouted. “Help me brainstorm, please?” She was giving him that damn puppy look. It was common knowledge that no one could resist Christine’s puppy eyes, soulless creature of darkness or not.

He huffed. “You know I don’t really know any.” She just gave him an encouraging nod. “Fine.” He kicked her again and flashed a shark-toothed sneer. “That one with the witches? Wicked?”

“Overdone.”

Okay, uh. What was the one they were doing this year? “Beauty and the Beast?”

“Nope. Pretty much all Disney stuff is overdone.” Christine was grinning. Damn her. She probably just wanted to watch him squirm.

Hang on, he’d seen a couple weird commercials for a Broadway show, and another one kept popping up in his Netflix recommendations for some god-forsaken reason. “Didn’t they make musicals of Shrek and Spongebob?”

She made a face. “They did, and _ew,_ no. Spongebob’s too new anyway.”

Michael huffed and ran a hand through his hair. She was right. _Everything_ seemed to have an issue. “I don’t know. Sound of Music?”

“Not my voice type. Golden Age stuff is soprano-heavy. Not to mention kinda dull.” Well, that was fair. He couldn’t exactly remember any old-school stuff other than that Do Re Mi song. The rest all blended together.

“That fairytale one with the dramatic Prince Charming song you and Jeremy scream at each other in the halls?”

Christine giggled and pressed a hand over her mouth. “Into the Woods? You’re not supposed to do Sondheim because the accompaniment is really hard, as fun as things like Agony are to sing.”

“Fucking.” Michael was out of ideas. He glanced around the library, before his eyes fell on Christine’s bookmark-riddled old novel. “Is there a Frankenstein musical?”

Christine shrugged. “There’s an off-Broadway one I’ve never listened to, and there’s Young Frankenstein, based on that movie, and it’s nothing like the book, and I’ve already gone into how much I hated _that.”_ She glared at the book on the table, shoving it into her open backpack on the floor.

This was getting ridiculous. “The man-eating plant one. What’s that one?”

“Okay,” Christine said with a roll of her eyes, “I know for a fact that Jeremy made you watch Little Shop like two weeks ago. He sent me the picture you took with him wearing your glasses to make fun of how much he looked like Seymour.”

Michael grinned, teeth still sharp as the alien plant’s. “He didn’t make me do shit. That movie is cheesy gold. We’ve been watching it together for years.”

Christine pouted at him before sending a razor-sharp smile of her own. “Well I wouldn’t want to use anything from it anyway. I love Audrey, but she has that voice affect, which would be so weird to do any of her stuff without, and an audition is supposed to show off my voice, not the character stereotype.” She sighed. “And it might be kinda overdone, too.”

During the awkward silence of Michael returning to his shitty graph, the light faded from her eyes. Christine bit her lip and glanced away, overzealous energy draining out of her shoulders. “Hey, speaking of Jeremy,” she started.

Anxiety bubbled in Michael’s gut. That was a terrible fucking way to bring up a topic. “Oh, no. What did he do? Do I have to kill him for being a bad boyfriend again?” He shoved aside his pile of papers and the folder he’d been using as his (ineffective) straightedge and leaned over the table to glare at Christine. He was sure his eyes had gone dark, which wasn’t ideal for what he prayed would stay a civil conversation that was definitely _not_ about him needing to smack some sense into his idiot of a best friend, but whatever.

Christine stared back with wide eyes. “What?” she said, blushing. “No! No, I was just, um…” She looked down at her hands, which were fiddling with the shell of her laptop lid and scraping away at the edges of the decorative stickers. “Just wondering…” Christine groaned. “Oh, how do I put this?” She slammed her hands down into her lap and tipped her head back, speaking to the ceiling. “He’s human, right?”

Um, duh? What was this about? Michael choked out a laugh. “The hell kind of question is that?”

Christine shook her head. “Right. Yeah, everyone knows that.” She bit her lip. “Well, maybe not everyone, because there are some weirdos out there, but it is also normal to assume that someone’s human, ‘cause like, what else would they be?” Her hands were flailing around as nervous giggles escaped her.

“Woah, calm down.” Michael grabbed for her arms, bracing her. Okay, this was bad, jut not in the way he’d suspected.

“Jeremy knows about…” Christine swallowed and gestured vaguely around. Her face had lost its blush, going scary pale. “Right?”

“I mean, yeah. He had that thing in his head,” Michael said with a shrug.

“Oh, yeah. Right.” She laughed again. It was unhappy. The sound made freezing insects crawl along Michael’s skin. “It’s weird how easily I forget about that, considering everything it did.” Christine ran a hand over her face. “Geez. I can’t believe it got to me, too. I didn’t think it was possible.”

Michael let her go, shoving his glasses up his nose. “That’s what Brooke told me, too. Guess it was more powerful than any of us realized.”

Christine chewed on her lip again, refusing to meet his gaze. Michael looked back at his homework. The lab report wasn’t really due until next week, but he’d hoped to curb his procrastination habit a little. So much for that. “Jeremy knows about you, right?” Christine asked.

Wow, okay. That made his blood stop in his veins. Hang on, did he actually have those? He’d never really thought about it. Wait, no. Not the time. He cleared his throat. “I kinda had to convince him we existed so I could get the Squip out.”

“Oh my gosh,” Christine said, staring at him like he’d just told her he was on the run from the law, “that must’ve been so hard. He’s been friends with you for how long? And he didn’t know before? How could you bring yourself to just tell him like that?”

Michael really didn’t like dwelling on this. He’d made the choice when he made it. There was no use debating whether or not it was the _right_ one, despite the fact that he did every day. He chuckled and wiped his now-sweaty hands on his pants. “I was a little more worried about the impending apocalypse.”

How _would_ things have gone if he hadn’t told him? Well, Jeremy would’ve freaked out at him in the bathroom and left, just like he did, only this time because he thought he was crazy, not so much evil. He would’ve almost destroyed the school with an actually evil demon’s help, just like he did. Michael would’ve shown up and tried to force feed him the Mountain Dew Red that he got blessed (and totally burned his hand carrying around), just like he did. The Squip would’ve prevented it until Jeremy gave it to Christine and Christine would’ve gotten away unscathed because of the greater power in her head, just like she did. The Squip would’ve fucked off back to hell where it belonged, just like it did. Michael would’ve talked to Jeremy in the hospital and answered whatever questions he had, just like he did.

Michael wouldn’t have had to deal with questions he didn’t know how to answer, and he wouldn’t have had to deal with an unusually distant Jeremy for a few weeks until he got his shit together again, but none of it probably would’ve mattered in the long run. So much for the greater good.

“Right, yeah. Sorry.” Christine was twirling her hair and staring at his half-started lab report.

Michael sighed. It didn’t matter what would’ve happened. What mattered was this. “Christine,” he said, and she looked up at him, a nervous light behind her eyes, “you haven’t been hiding stuff from him, have you?”

She bit her lip and yanked at the lock of hair between her fingers. “How did he react when you told him?”

With a shrug, Michael said, “I mean, he was mid-Squip, so he called me a freak and fucked off, but he’s pretty cool with it now.” And he was. For as much as Michael’s uncertainty ate him alive from the inside, Jeremy was totally cool with it. In fact, he loved it. He once convinced Michael to help him prank Dustin Kropp as revenge for not helping with some group project, and laughed his head off when Dustin shrieked like a baby. He would use Michael’s powers for easy lighting when they got stoned together and then marvel at Michael’s eyes and teeth as the high stripped away the details of his humanoid disguise. Heck, he’d insisted Michael sing along to ‘Feed Me’ with him during their Little Shop of Horrors viewing party, using his multi-layered demon voice for Audrey II.

Christine was teary-eyed. “I’m a terrible girlfriend.”

Michael shot her a look over his glasses. “You know he won’t care, right?”

“Do I?” Her voice broke. “Michael, I don’t know about humans the way you do. I don’t know about _Jeremy_ the way you do. What if he finds out I’ve been lying and dumps me on the spot?”

Someone was coming up behind Christine, and Michael didn’t even have to look up to tell who it was. Hello, natural familiarity of over twelve years of friendship. Michael could pick that nerd out of a crowd in his sleep. He fought down his instinct to acknowledge Jeremy. For Christine’s sake. “He wouldn’t,” Michael said, shaking his head, hoping against all hope that Jeremy would be able to quell whatever desire had brought him looking for them when he had class for long enough to hear this.

“But what if he finds out I’m supposed to be evil and gets super scared that I’ll do what the Squip did? What if he thinks I’m trying to corrupt him? What if he’s afraid of me?” Christine was full-on panicking now. Her hair was flying out around her face. Her eyes were dark voids, unmasked in her frantic state. She was crying.

Thank fuck for a nearly empty library.

Michael laid his hand on top of hers in what he figured was probably a comforting gesture. “If he felt like that about any of this, he wouldn’t still be friends with me, _duh.”_ He gave her hand a squeeze. “Do you know how much he likes you? Do you know how _long_ he’s liked you?”

Christine shook her head. “No, not really. We’re not great at pet names and cheesy stuff. I think he can tell I’m scared.” Her eyes widened. “Oh shit! What if he breaks up with me because he doesn’t think I’m interested anymore?”

“Shut it,” Michael growled, a wave of heat sweeping over him. Christine shrunk back. So did Jeremy, who was still hovering behind her, expression laced with concern. Oops. Michael took a deep breath and turned the hellfire dial down a few notches. “He’s head-over-heels for you,” he said quietly. “The whole reason he let the Squip in? He wanted to be cool to get closer to you.”

Christine curled into herself. “I’m not cool.”

“You are to Jeremy.”

“I won’t be once he knows.” Her eyes were wide and wet and looked like polished obsidian.

“Once I know what?” Jeremy said.

Christine jumped a foot in the air, whirling around to face him. “Jeremy! How long have you been standing there?”

If Jeremy did a double-take at her eyes, Michael didn’t see it.“Depends, uh…” he shrugged and scratched at the back of his neck, “were you talking about what it sounded like you were talking about?”

Christine’s face could be compared to a firetruck. “I, uh—”

Michael grinned. This he could work with. “Yeah, Jer. I was just telling Chris about how you’ve always had a thing for bad girls.”

“Bad girls?” Jeremy met his gaze and raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, man. Weren’t you just telling me the other day that you’d totally fuck the devil?”

Jeremy flushed but rolled his eyes. “I would absolutely _not_ sleep with Lucifer.”

Smirking, Michael continued. “How about a cute, obsessive, devilish theatre-lover?”

Jeremy went even redder. “We haven’t—” he stuttered. “We’re not—”

“Answer the damn question, dude.”

Christine found her voice first. “Jeremy!” she squeaked, standing so quickly she tripped over her backpack. “I’m a—”

Concern overwrote Jeremy’s embarrassment. He scooped her up, hugging her close as she shivered. “Hey. Hey, Christine.” He lifted her face towards his, smiling as he looked into her dark, glassy eyes. “You’re a—?”

She tried to pull away, tried to screw her eyes shut, but Jeremy fought against her flailing limbs to keep hugging her. “I didn’t know how to tell you!” she protested. “I was waiting for the right time but it never came and I’m so sorry I lied to you and I’d totally understand if you—”

Jeremy shut her up with a kiss, which Christine melted into. Michael could sense her dark power receding back into her as Jeremy did a remarkable job at being a fucking fantastic boyfriend.

“Told you so,” Michael said to himself, returning to his mess of papers and tuning out their hushed, so-cute-and-gushy-it-was-sickening conversation. The lab report totally wasn’t gonna happen, he decided, instead going back to his doodles. Next up, ‘Star Wars as a Porno, Part 2: The Cursed Edition.’ Now how well could he draw Jar Jar fucking Palpatine?

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really having fun with this AU. I hope you're all enjoying it as much as I am.  
> Catch me projecting my theatre biases over here. Sorry not sorry.  
> Jeremy might be a wreck in general, but he's also a surprisingly good boyfriend in my mind. 
> 
> I adore feedback, so please feel free to tell me what you think!


End file.
